Book Review - To Have and to Hold
To Have and to Hold by Anne Bennett
On a positive note, the story itself was both interesting and enjoyable. It’s just a shame it was let down by the quality of the storytelling.
There was a rather forced feeling to the dialog. The way you would write something and the way you would say the same thing are often very different. For this book it seemed to me that the characters dialog leant heavily towards the ‘writing’ style rather than the more appropriate ‘speaking’ style of communication.
Character development was rather lacking, you are told a lot about the main characters early on and changes to their personality, fears, wishes, all come suddenly without any real build up. Some attempt to create a bit of a lead-in to such changes is made but not very effectively.
Quite a bit of time is spent with the author trying to build an image of the world surrounding the characters, to draw the reader’s imagination into the world and let them hear, see, smell and feel what life was like in Birmingham during the events of WWII. The effectiveness of these descriptions is varied, I think often my overactive imagination was able to fill in the gaps and make up for what the descriptions themselves lacked. This made it hard to make an objective assessment but I think there was definitely something lacking here, something needed to really bring the story to life.
So what was good about the book? Well the main character was interesting, her thoughts and actions are both realistic and understandable given the circumstances in which she finds herself, and those circumstances are also realistic for the age in which she was living. She is courageous and kind but not without fault.
On a positive note, the story itself was both interesting and enjoyable. It’s just a shame it was let down by the quality of the storytelling.
There was a rather forced feeling to the dialog. The way you would write something and the way you would say the same thing are often very different. For this book it seemed to me that the characters dialog leant heavily towards the ‘writing’ style rather than the more appropriate ‘speaking’ style of communication.
Character development was rather lacking, you are told a lot about the main characters early on and changes to their personality, fears, wishes, all come suddenly without any real build up. Some attempt to create a bit of a lead-in to such changes is made but not very effectively.
Quite a bit of time is spent with the author trying to build an image of the world surrounding the characters, to draw the reader’s imagination into the world and let them hear, see, smell and feel what life was like in Birmingham during the events of WWII. The effectiveness of these descriptions is varied, I think often my overactive imagination was able to fill in the gaps and make up for what the descriptions themselves lacked. This made it hard to make an objective assessment but I think there was definitely something lacking here, something needed to really bring the story to life.
So what was good about the book? Well the main character was interesting, her thoughts and actions are both realistic and understandable given the circumstances in which she finds herself, and those circumstances are also realistic for the age in which she was living. She is courageous and kind but not without fault.